by Prof. Mark Fleishman
At the beginning of 2019, the University of Cape Town’s Centre for Theatre, Dance & Performance Studies (previously the department of Drama and the School of Dance), generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, embarked on an exciting 5-year research project on Re-imagining Tragedy from Africa and the Global South, led by Mark Fleishman and Mandla Mbothwe.
The broader research project proposes to take a concept – tragedy – from the very beginnings of theatre in its European manifestation, and to reimagine it from a perspective in Africa that is at once directed at the complex challenges of our global postcolonial present and towards our possible futures. The research is based on a recognition of the numerous adaptations and stagings of ancient tragedies by major writers and theatre-makers across the African continent and in the Afro-diaspora. It is also inspired by the concept of African Tragedy as outlined by Wole Soyinka for example in his essay from the 1960s, ‘The Fourth Stage’.[1]
There clearly seems to be something about these plays and their playing that appeals to African theatre-makers, performers and audiences. The research project creates the space for an extended interrogation of this vast body of work produced in the theatres of Africa. Furthermore, it uses performance methodologies as analytical tools to gain purchase on the complex realities of the colonial aftermath by investigating current events in the postcolony beyond the theatre, through the “prism of tragedy”.[2]
Importantly, the project tries to make a space from which to challenge the Eurocentric biases and preconceptions of Theatre Studies in two respects: first by shifting, and thereby challenging, the perspective from which it operates and the assumptions that align with this predominant perspective; and second, by challenging its predominant methodologies by engaging art practice as a mode of research in a central way alongside other more conventional research modes and methods.
ReTAGS is conceived as part of what has become known as southern theory [3] – the production of theory and/or refiguration of a conceptual field from the vantage point of the global South. In their 2012 book, Theory from the South, Jean and John Comaroff, anthropologists from the University of Chicago but with a long working relationship to/in Africa, suggest the possibility that “in the present moment, it is the global South that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large” rather than being either a laboratory or source of raw data for the production of insights in the global North.[4]
Their argument is basically that modernity is a “world-historical production”, a collaboration of North and South, and “it can as well be narrated from its undersides as it can from its self-proclaimed centres”.[5] They are at pains to make clear that they are not seeking to simply “turn the story upside down”[6] nor do they see the South and North as clearly demarcated entities. Their contention is that “while there is much south in the North, much north in the South”, the global South does also manifest as “an ‘ex-centric’[7] location, an elsewhere to mainstream Euro-America, … [and] its importance lies in that ex-centricity: in the angle of vision it provides us from which to estrange our world in its totality in order better to make sense of its present and future”.[8]
Such a perspective accepts the impossibility of escaping from the conceptual terminology of the Euro-American disciplinary framework and its epistemologies. However, it sets about reimagining such concepts and terminologies in ways that make them mutate to become useful in counterhegemonic ways. The project puts Africa to work differently, to radically reorient thinking about theatre, and its study, and in a broader sense, puts this thinking to use in reflecting on our collective and multiple “aftermaths in which the present seems stricken with immobility and pain and ruin”.[9]
The project builds on Mark Fleishman’s lengthy experience with tragedy in the theatre and in Africa. He has in the past created two significant works based on tragic sources. The first was a version of Medea (1994) at the point at which South Africa was moving from the system of apartheid into a new dispensation[10], and the second, a version of the Orestes myth, titled In the City of Paradise (1998), in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission process a few years later.[11] The latter work was re-staged in 2015 with a new generation of young performers responding to the consequences of the policy of reconciliation proposed by the Mandela government post-1994.
As indicated above, an important part of the ReTAGS project involves the making of four new ‘tragedies’ together with our partners at Magnet Theatre and The Baxter Theatre Centre. These artistic research investigations of tragedy/the tragic use anthropologist Tim Ingold’s “art as inquiry” model[12] in which thinking arises in the course of making or in Erin Manning and Brian Massumi’s terms, “making as thinking through action,”[13] to engage with ancient texts from a perspective in the global South and specifically South Africa. These performance projects also, importantly, involve an attempt to consolidate and take forward the thinking on the role of art practice as a research methodology in the discipline of Theatre & Performance.
If you would like to know more about the ReTAGS research please follow this link: http://www.retags.uct.ac.za
And to read more about the first ReTAGS artistic research production Antigone (not quite/quiet), staged in 2019, please see the next post!
[1] This essay was first published in Jefferson, D.W. and Knight, G. W. 1969. The morality of art : essays presented to G. Wilson Knight, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul. The version I have used here is: Soyinka, W. 1988. ‘The Fourth Stage: Through the Mysteries of Ogun to the Origin of Yoruba Tragedy’. In Biodun Jeyifo (ed.) Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture. Ibadan: New Horn Press, pp. 21-34.
[2] Quayson, A. 2003. Calibrations: Reading for the Social. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, chapter 3, pp. 56-75 (56).
[3] Comaroff, J and J. 2012a. Theory from the South, or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa. Boulder CO: Paradigm Press.
[4] Comaroff, J and J. 2012a, p. 1.
[5] Comaroff, J and J. 2012a, pp. 6-7.
[6] Comaroff, J and J. 2012a, p. 7.
[7] The concept of the ‘ex-centric’ is taken from Homi Bhabha. 1994. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge.
[8] Comaroff, J and J. 2012b, p. 2.
[9] Scott, D. 2014. Omens of Adversity: Tragedy, Time, Memory, Justice. Durham and London: Duke University Press, p. 6.
[10] See Mezzabotta, M. 1994. Medea, or the Myth of the Murderous (M)other. Didaskalia, 1(5). Available online at: http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol1no5/mezzabotta.html. [accessed 17 June 2017]; Van Zyl Smit, B. 1994. Euripides’ Medea Didaskalia, 1(5). Available online at: http://www.didaskalia.net/issues/vol1no5/vanzyl.html. [accessed 17 June 2017]; Banning, Y. 1997. (Re)viewing Medea. SATJ, 11(1&2), 54-88.
[11] See Von Weyenberg, A. 2013. The Politics of Adaptation: Contemporary African Drama and Greek Tragedy. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Chapter 3: ‘The Oresteia in Post-Apartheid South Africa’, pp. 91-140; Van Zyl Smit, B. 2010. Orestes and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Classical Receptions Journal, 2(1): 114-135; Steinmeyer, E. 2007. ‘Post-Apartheid Electra: In the City of Paradise’. In Hardwick, L. and Gillespie, C. (eds.) Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 102-118.
[12] Ingold, T. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, p. 6.
[13] Manning, E and Massumi, B. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the ecology of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, p. 89.